Amid work to reconcile its COVID-19 death data with the Health Department’s figures, the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) has started collecting data on the number of COVID-19 deaths from burial grounds in the city.
“We have 199 burial grounds in 15 zones of the city. We will compile data from all burial grounds shortly. We will include all COVID-19 deaths,” said a senior official of GCC.
The move comes a day after the Directorate of Public Health (DPH) and Preventive Medicine constituted a committee to reconcile COVID-19 death reports of the GCC. Officials noticed that several COVID-19 deaths were not notified to the Health Department. The committee, comprising eight members, is chaired by P. Vadivelan, director of public health and preventive medicine (officer on special duty).
T.S. Selvavinayagam, DPH, in an official communication to the Commissioner of GCC, requested that COVID-19 death reports of patients be sent in a prescribed format, as early as possible, for auditing purposes. All COVID-19 deaths since March to date should be shared. He added that from now on, all COVID-19 deaths in the Chennai Corporation had to be notified, on a daily basis, to the directorate by identified officials, such as the city health officer, and all death reports must be scrutinised by the committee.
While a senior health official said that reconciliation of deaths with the GCC and counting of home deaths was under way, a GCC official said, “We have no role in declaring a COVID-19 death. Let the committee give its findings on the number of COVID-19 deaths in the city”.
“We are monitoring all deaths reported, and reconciliation is going on. This is routine work, and reconciliation is part of administrative work. We will be able to tell the final number only after going through official records and reconciling data,” Dr. Selvavinayagam said.
Though both Health Department and GCC officials declined to confirm that over 200 COVID-19 deaths in the city did not figure in the State data, official sources said that this was a matter of “delayed notification” rather than under reporting.
An official who is part of the committee said that private hospitals were instructed to report COVID-19 deaths accurately and the issue would be sorted in a week. Official sources pointed out that these deaths could have occurred in private hospitals and homes and intimated to GCC. Deaths in government hospitals were being directly accounted for by the Health Department. There was no answer to the question on whether GCC had completed the death audit to notify deaths.
A number of doctors on COVID-19 duty in government hospitals in Chennai said that every death that occurred in the COVID-19 ward was being recorded at the institution-level. “These are absolute numbers that cannot be changed. However, we find that many deaths are not notified in the daily bulletin. We do not know how and where the numbers go missing,” a government doctor said.
